Last night I was invited by Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO to participate in a WordPress Google Hangout. If you missed it then I’ve embedded the video below and I’ve also included some links to some of the hosts and plugins I mentioned during the course of the show.

Earlier this week I did a blog post about the development of Sennza 3.0 and during that post I mentioned that I mentioned that I used TinyMCE styles to add two, three and four column layouts using Foundation 5 which prompted this question on Twitter:

@jordesign Glad you enjoyed it Sir! Sure thing! I'll add a Gist on Github tomorrow for you and tweet you

As many of my WordPress peers are aware, I have become almost obsessive about my WordPress development workflow over the last 12 months. So much so that I’ve even started a podcast with Jason Resnick about it!

The main reason for this obsession is to assist Sennza’s internal development process by creating a solid, repeatable and consistent workflow so that all WordPress projects will be setup using the same environment, folder structure and tools. This consistency means that at any given time, any staff member can either start development on a new site or add a feature to an existing site and not have to spend time either setting their own development environment or lose time getting their head around an existing sites theme structure.

During the development of Sennza 3.0 I was able to spend some time experimenting with Foundation 5 and as a result I’ve fallen head over heels for it and we’ll be using it in our client work going forward. I’ll now do a shakedown of the development of Sennza 3.0 as I know a few of my peers have been curious to know what took place behind the scenes!

With 3.9 well underway, coupled with the fact that “features as plugins” need to be ready at the start of release cycle, not during, my mind has started wondering what would make for good additions in WordPress 4.0

As Matt Mullenweg has said previously, 4.0 is just the next version after 3.9 and the version before 4.1, there shouldn’t be anything special about it. However, no matter what you say about it 4.0 is psychologically a big milestone for WordPress and it’s going to receive lots of attention regardless.

Now I must state that this is totally my own wish list, but if I could choose what features would make it into 4.0, I would choose 2, and only 2 features. These are the two I would choose and why:

Today we are excited to present the 3rd incarnation of the Sennza website.

Sennza as a company has come along way in the past year, we have had a chance to work on some exciting projects with fantastic clients and in that regard our previous website was really letting us down. It did not do a good job of displaying the work we create and type of company we are. That changes today!

When we set out to redesign the Sennza website we decided to really get back to the “Sennza” philosophy and keeping things simple, discarding any thing on the site that was superfluous to our main goals.

Sennza were approached to provide a code review for this plugin. The Google team have done an amazing job with the development and we look forward to future releases. This is the 2nd official WordPress plugin by Google that Sennza have been involved with, the first being Google App Engine for WordPress.

Audrius Jankauskas, CEO and Co­Founder of ImpressPages wrote up his thoughts on CMS Trends for 2014 and it’s worth a read.

Interestingly, of the 160+ content management systems that w3techs.com tracks only 24% grew in market share. 76% remained the same or shrank.

WordPress seems set to continue on it’s growth trajectory as it has done over the last year, but what was interesting to me is that Joomla and Drupal (2nd and 3rd place after WordPress) had their overall percentage shrink. So much that Audrius predicts we could see a new comer in the top 3 CMS’s this year. We will have to wait to find out.

Everyone has experienced the joy of trying to figure out exactly what the tiny distorted letter at the bottom of a web form say, only to find out that what they thought the letters spelt were not even close. Alternately, and my personal favourite, you can try hitting the refresh button several dozen times until you get one that is legible enough to attempt.

One of the first questions we get from new clients is: “Why have you excluded optimisation for Internet Explorer 7 & 8 in the proposal?”

It’s a valid question, which is why we need to outline it specifically in all our proposals. With web design projects both the client and the web designers have to weigh up the pros and cons of what to include in a project versus the time and cost for those features.

Before I delve further into why this is not as big a deal as most people initially think, I want to provide you with some statistics on those 2 versions of Internet Explorer: